Sharks in Australia

Shark attacks, of course, can happen all year round, it’s just that for most of us taking a dip in the sea is a summer or hot weather sort of pastime. I’ve been looking into shark attack figures for 2014 and it appears that so far this year there have been 18 of them.

Just yesterday, Thursday, 2 October, Sean Pollard lost his arm and both of his hands in a shark attack near Esperance in Western Australia. You could say he’s lucky to be alive, and I’m sure he is, but the stats are interesting.

Of those 18 attacks, four ended in a fatality, which does fall in line with previous statistics showing that just one in four shark attacks are fatal. As I’ve said in previous posts about sharks, if you were to ever find yourself in the unthinkable situation of being attacked by a shark, it is always worth fighting back.

Sharks really are not up for a fight.

Shark attack

Today’s video is of a real shark attack which happened just a couple of days ago and was videoed in full. It happened in waters close to the Neptune Islands which are about 50 kilometres off of the tip of Yorke Peninsular in South Australia.

Before I show you that video, a reminder that I am very much a football fan. In football, when two players are 100% committed to winning the ball and the ball is the same distance away from each of them, we call this a 50-50 tackle.

Sometimes things don’t work out so well in 50-50 tackles, somebody might get hurt; a raised foot, an unusual bounce of the ball, a knee embedding itself into a thigh or somebody’s face, any one of these could lead to a serious injury.

This video has gone viral in the last few days and I think it very much shows what happens when two sharks go for the same piece of bait in the same way as those 50-50 tackles…

Apparently, the people who shot this video did see the larger shark afterwards, but they are really not sure what happened to the smaller one. I’ve watched this video a few times, I think the big shark ‘pulls out of the tackle’ to carry on with my analogy.

If you look closely, I don’t think you will find any evidence of the big sharks teeth sinking into the little shark, and my suspicion is that if the big shark really did want to eat the little shark, there would have been more evidence of that happening.

Have you ever been just about to sink your teeth into a sandwich and noticed a live cockroach poking its head out from underneath the cheese? No, neither have I, but if I ever did, my crunching mouth would go into reverse big time.

That’s what I think has happened here and it’s obviously something they also think might have happened in the video.

Thanks for the links Glenn, attacks have certainly been on the rise over the last few years. Ballina in northern New South Wales is the new hotspot, they are currently chucking loads of money at various defence systems…

I'm BobinOz and I moved to Australia in November 2007 after living in England for a very long time. Why did I move and what's it like here? All this and more answered right here at Bobinoz. Click here to read more on my about me page.